Snowden Asks Putin on Live TV If Russia Spies Like U.S.

April 17 (Bloomberg) -- Edward Snowden, the former U.S.
security contractor living under asylum in Russia, made a
surprise appearance on Russian television to ask President
Vladimir Putin if the nation spies on its citizens like the U.S.

“Does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the
communications of millions of individuals?” Snowden asked the
former KGB colonel through a video link from an unidentified
location during Putin’s annual live call-in show, broadcast
nationwide from Moscow.

Putin, addressing Snowden as a fellow “former spy,” said
that Russia’s intelligence services are “strictly regulated”
and the country can’t afford such broad spying, an answer that
several specialists on Russia said belies the extensive
surveillance conducted in the country.

Snowden’s disclosures about U.S. spying last year set off a
global debate about the trade-offs between privacy and security
and hurt ties with European allies. The London-based Guardian
and the Washington Post shared a Pulitzer prize this week for
reporting his leaked material on the top-secret programs.
President Barack Obama has imposed some surveillance limits as a
result of the disclosures.

“We do it of course, but we don’t allow ourselves such a
massive, out-of-control scale,” Putin said about gathering
communications in the fight against terrorism and financial
crime, after a hasty translation by one of the television
channel’s presenters. “I hope we will not get there.”

He said Russia doesn’t have the financial or technical
resources that the U.S. has available.

‘Strict Control’

“The most important is that our special services, thank
God, are under strict control by the state and society and that
their activities are regulated by law,” Putin said.

Caitlin Hayden, a spokesman for the White House National
Security Council, said the White House had no comment on the
appearance by Snowden, who the U.S. has charged with espionage.

Joshua Rovner, author of “Fixing the Facts: National
Security and the Politics of Intelligence,” said Putin’s claims
are “disingenuous to say the least.”

Russia’s main surveillance system is called the SORM, which
was initially developed in the 1980s and captures “captures
telephone and Internet traffic, and according to recent reports,
stores a great deal of information and metadata on network
subscribers,” said Rovner, who is a director at the Tower
Center for Political Studies of Southern Methodist University in
Dallas, Texas.

Government Access

Russian mobile phone companies are required to open remote
access to all information to the country’s law enforcement
agencies, including the Federal Security Service, the main
successor agency to the KGB.

“Putin’s statement that society has some control over the
security services is an outright lie,” said Andrey Soldatov, an
author and researcher on Russia’s intelligence services.
“Everything else Putin said was a half-truth.”

Snowden’s appearance coincides with heightened tension
between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine. It came as U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterpart, Sergei Lavrov
were meeting in Geneva with representatives from the European
Union and Ukraine in an attempt to defuse the situation, which
has escalated into deadly fighting between Ukrainian security
forces and pro-Russian separatists.

Propaganda Value

It isn’t a surprise that the Snowden-Putin exchange
happened at this point because Russia “has been trying to
extract maximum propaganda value from the Snowden leaks for many
months,” Rovner said in an e-mail.

“From Russia’s perspective, the chance to take a shot at
the NSA dovetails nicely with the revelation that the CIA
director was recently in Kiev,” Rovner said. “All of this
feeds the Russian narrative that the United States is meddling
in Ukraine, and that U.S. foreign policy is somehow sinister
because it is bound up with secret intelligence agencies.”

Putin may have wanted to play off Snowden’s popularity, as
he’s considered by many to be a hero, rights activist and truth
seeker, said Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Council on Foreign and
Defense Policy in Moscow.

“This is certainly a planned little piece of theater to
show that people striking poses and blaming Russia for violating
everything in Ukraine are a case of the pot calling the kettle
black,” Lukyanov said. “It won’t affect Russia-U.S. relations
since we’re already living in a de facto Cold War.”

Jabbing U.S.

Putin took a jab at the U.S., blaming its surveillance
programs for complicating talks with Europe.

“Sometimes it is very difficult to negotiate with them on
geopolitical issues,” Putin said. “It is hard to negotiate
with people who even at home whisper among themselves because
they’re afraid the Americans are listening in.”

Snowden has said he worked alone in taking thousands of
classified documents, denying claims made by U.S. lawmakers that
he was an agent for a foreign government. He was granted one
year of asylum in Russia in August, after arriving in June from
Hong Kong. It’s too early to say if he’ll apply for an
extension, his lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said in January.

Putin, who said last year that he’d never met the fugitive,
has denied that Russian agents have worked with Snowden or
invited him to fly through Moscow. He blamed Snowden’s continued
presence in the country on the U.S. revoking his passport.

Legal Questions

U.S. courts have split on whether the NSA’s collection of
phone records is legal, while both a White House review group
and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board have said
the program isn’t effective and should be stopped. A majority of
the five-member privacy board said the program is illegal.

Obama has defended electronic spying as a bulwark against
terrorism while promising U.S. citizens and allies that he’ll
put restraints on the government’s sweeping surveillance
programs. U.S. data collection programs were expanded during
President George W. Bush’s administration which, in response to
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., won passage
by Congress of the Patriot Act.

Last month, the U.S. leader released proposals based on
recommendations from intelligence proposals for reworking data
collection. Under the plan, which parallels legislation proposed
in the House of Representatives, the government would no longer
keep and hold mass phone records from U.S. companies including
AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc.

Carriers would be instructed to search their records for
information based on requests from the government, which would
be subject to judicial review.

The fixes proposed by Obama and top lawmakers still would
let the government access phone and Internet records though the
NSA would no longer store the data. Technology and Internet
company executives, including Facebook Inc. Chief Executive
Officer Mark Zuckerberg, have pressed the administration to take
more steps to limit surveillance.